King Midas: a Romance eBook

He went to the edge of the woods, where he could see
her a short distance below, hurrying down the path
with a step as light and free as ever. The wind
had met her at the forest’s edge and joined her
once more, playing about her skirts and tossing the
lily again. As Arthur watched her, the old music
came back into his heart; his eyes sparkled, and all
his soul seemed to be dancing in time with her light
motion. Thus it went until she came to a place
where the path must hide her from his view. The
young man held his breath, and when she turned a cry
of joy escaped him; she saw him and waved her hand
to him gaily as she swept on out of his sight.

For a moment afterwards he stood rooted to the spot,
then whirled about and laughed aloud. He put
his hand to his forehead, which was flushed and hot,
and he gazed about him, as if he were not sure where
he was. “Oh, she is so beautiful!”
he cried, his face a picture of rapture. “So
beautiful!”

And he started through the forest as wildly as any
madman, now muttering to himself and now laughing
aloud and making the forest echo with Helen’s
name. When he stopped again he was far away from
the path, in a desolate spot, but tho he was staring
around him, he saw no more than before. Trembling
had seized his limbs, and he sank down upon the yellow
forest leaves, hiding his face in his hands and whispering,
“Oh, if I should lose her! If I should lose
her!” As old Polonius has it, truly it was “the
very ecstasy of love.”

CHAPTER II

“A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to
startle, and waylay.”

The town of Oakdale is at the present time a flourishing
place, inhabited principally by “suburbanites,”
for it lies not very far from New York; but the Reverend
Austin Davis, who was the spiritual guardian of most
of them, had come to Oakdale some twenty and more
years ago, when it was only a little village, with
a struggling church which it was the task of the young
clergyman to keep alive. Perhaps the growth of
the town had as much to do with his success as his
own efforts; but however that might have been he had
received his temporal reward some ten years later,
in the shape of a fine stone church, with a little
parsonage beside it. He had lived there ever
since, alone with his one child,—­for just
after coming to Oakdale he had married a daughter
of one of the wealthy families of the neighborhood,
and been left a widower a year or two later.

A more unromantic and thoroughly busy man than Mr.
Davis at the age of forty-five, when this story begins,
it would not have been easy to find; but nevertheless
people spoke of no less than two romances that had
been connected with his life. One of them had
been his early marriage, which had created a mild
sensation, while the other had come into his life
even sooner, in fact on the very first day of his
arrival at Oakdale.